Jumat, 27 Agustus 2010

I maintain code for a few daemons/services written in Perl (most of them serve requests by forking/preforking). Reading post on Ubic, I started to feel that I am reinventing a lot of wheels. Currently I am doing these by writing my own code, as much as which I hope can be offloaded to CPAN in the future:

Autorestart when process size is becoming too big. We need to do this gracefully, meaning wait until there is no more clients being serviced, unless process size really gets too big in which case we need to restart immediately. Checking period can be configured.

Autorestart if script or modules change on disk. Also needs to be done gracefully. This is usually being recommended to be used only on development environment, but I use this too in production, for ease of deployment. But we need to check first (e.g. via "perl -c" or "eval + require" whether the new code from disk is okay.

Avoid duplicate instance (currently always using Proc::PID::File, but I'm open to better mechanism).

Limit clients concurrency. Sometimes this is simple (a single limit for all clients) and sometimes not so much (different limits for different IP/IP blocks/authenticated users/groups/etc).

Reap dead child processes and maintain a count of child processes.

Handle timed out clients. This is rather cumbersome with blocking I/O.

Write init script. This is the part I dislike the most, since there are tons of different OS flavors out there, and with more recent efforts like upstart, launchd, systemd, sooner or later I will certainly have to write different init scripts. I wish there is something equivalent to PSGI/Plack for general services, which can plug my code to whatever service manager might be out there.

Rabu, 25 Agustus 2010

Uncapture modifier. The new /r regexp substitution modifier in Perl 5.13.2 indicates that there might be hope for even more modifiers in the future. A possible modifier might be one that ignores all capture groups, which can solve this guy's problem.

require that can also import. I wonder why "require" doesn't also support importing like "use" does: use MODULE_NAME LIST... since it already support "require MODULE_NAME". This way, whenever I want to defer loading some modules, I can just replace "use" with "require" and put the statement under some "if" statement.

the backtick function.. Do you find yourself often having to do use a temporary variable like this, $cmd = "some longish and ".quote("complexly formed")."command"; before doing backtick `$cmd`? This is because unlike in PHP, we have system() but no backtick(). Most probably remnants from shell. There is Capture::Tiny for more general solution but of course it's a bit more cumbersome.